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I hope you all saw Frank Cottrell Boyce's Proms lecture reported in the Guardian last weekend - here are a few edited highlights on reading and school libraries if you missed it, plus a link to the whole lecture on the Guardian website.

"I don’t write to help inspire people to become writers. I write to inspire them to become readers. Because I believe good readers make better engineers, and bakers, and surgeons, and parents and partners and are just a lot happier...

When we – teachers, parents, carers, friends – read to our children, I believe that’s what we’re doing. Laying down strata of fuel, fuel studded with fossils and treasures. If we ask for anything back, we burn it off too soon...

Why is this important? Why am I talking about it? Because I fear that the places where this kind of generosity thrives are being destroyed. What are those places? Public spaces. Parks, playing fields, scout huts, libraries and especially school libraries. I regularly go to schools now where there is no library. Or the library has become a “Learning Resource Centre” - which means it’s been kitted out with computers and made to look like a call centre. A book is not a learning resource. It’s the knife that picks the lock of your isolation. It’s a box of delights."